Mom and Dad are too busy enjoying themselves in Chengdu, that they did not have time to write a blurb to go along with the photos. So they have asked me to write some commentaries in the meantime since I was also recently at Jiuzhaigou. Enjoy!
Jiuzhaigou is a large national park in China filled with beautiful greenery and lots of lakes and waterfalls. Some of the landscaping is very similar to what can be found in Canada, and just like the Summer Palace in Beijing, the experience is different for each of the four seasons that you visit. From the pictures, it looks like the forest is still lush with healthy trees and turqoise water.
Jiuzhaigou is a relatively large park, so there are two options in which you can tour the park; bus or hiking. Of course you cannot hike the whole park in one day, but from the looks of the picture above, Mom and Dad decided to do a little bit of hiking, since they are on this side of the lake.
They did write and mentioned that the busses were ridiculously crowded and the signs that directed you towards the stations were very difficult to follow. Apparantly they had taken the wrong path at one point, and had to double back which means a lot of walking. Stations are spaced very far a part and can take up to 20/30 min to walk between each (up and down stairs). Mom said that she is getting a foot massage later to recover her feet from all the hiking.
To give you a perspective on how crowded it was, Mom and Dad had reported that one of the line-ups to get onto a shuttle bus was at a stand-still that they had to be pushed along. Before boarding the bus, they had almost gotten crushed by old chinese ladies trying to push their way through. Can you imagine Dad being run over by a tiny chinese lady....no? well it happens; these people are rutheless.
Naturally vibrant colors of the lakes ... not photoshopped!
When you reach a large waterfall like the one above in the park, it is ridiculously crowded because everyone wants to take pictures. Mom and Dad had the same observation I did when I visited; there are so many local Chinese tourists, and not many westerners. Even as a North American Chinese, you really do stand out in the crowd. This is most likely because Jiuzhaigou is very hard to get to. You can either take a 10 hour bus ride from Chengdu, or take a flight. Thankfully Mom and Dad were able to book a flight and find a nice hotel to stay in.
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Unlike many other parts of China, Jiuzhaigou is at a high altitude so the weather is cool and not humid, much like a summer morning in Ontario. It looks like Mom and Dad got some great weather the day they visited. Not hot (as they are wearing their jackets) but with lots of sun in the afternoon.
